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About queenieofaces

QueenieOfAces is a graduate student in the U.S. studying Japanese religion. She is a queer asexual. She also blogs over at Concept Awesome and runs Resources for Ace Survivors. She is never quite sure what to write in these introduction things, but this one time she accidentally got a short story on asexuality published in an erotica magazine.

6 Responses to Linkspam: June 7th, 2013

I thought the author of that HuffPost piece wasn’t doing too badly until I got to this sentence: “This could be crucial for a young person trying to come to terms with their asexuality at an age when they would be expected to raging [sic] with hormones.” Seeing that “it must be a hormone problem” crap coming from trolls is one thing; seeing it popularized on a credible news site (even if it is the blog section) is quite another.

I usually see the phrase “raging with hormones” as shorthand for “experiencing new and confusing sexual desires and potentially wanting to have lots of sex”; the only other context I see it in is denigrating teenage girls (it’s almost always girls specifically) for being emotional and unreasonable. While it’s true that most aces go through the turmoils of puberty just like everyone else, I didn’t actually think they were trying to imply that aces have hormone *problems.*

I’m a little concerned with the book that’s coming out. I’m not sure if they mean “not having sex is a radical act” or “the existence of people who don’t inherently desire sex means we should rethink some of our basic assumptions about people and sex.” I don’t think of my sexual orientation as something inherently radical *or* political, though the way I talk about (or act on? for example, advocacy/awareness) that orientation may be radical or political.

It’s awesome that asexuality is included in that booklet from the UK, though.

Well, given that it’s approaching asexuality from a feminist perspective, and feminism has a history of considering non-heterosexual orientations “radical,” I’m not entirely surprised. There’s also, especially among radical feminists, a history of considering the “personal” to be “political,” which means that one’s sexual orientation can be considered a political statement. (This led to all sorts of turmoil and drama in the 1970s, when heterosexual women were thrown out of some radfem groups for not being “radical enough” to be lesbians. I highly recommend Daring to Be Bad by Alice Echols if you ever want to read about 1960s and 1970s radfem in the States.)
I’ll be interested in reading the book, in any case (am already plotting on how to convince my university to buy a copy), although I’m prepared to frown at it in consternation if necessary.